


Melissa´s choice

by Freline



Series: Paths of Fate [3]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-16
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-14 22:32:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11217600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Freline/pseuds/Freline
Summary: Melissa comes home one day and sees Visser Three demorph in their living room. She gets away before he notices her and runs into the woods. She never expected to see the things she did.She becomes the Animorphs newest member, while Ax and two other Andalites are held captive by the Visser and freed a few days later by an old friend he once met on the Andalite home world. The results of this meeting force him to part ways with the Animorphs for a while and find his own place in the war.





	1. Chapter 1

Melissa opened the front door of the house and heard her parents in the living room, talking to someone. She slowly walked in, trying to be as silent as possible. When she passed the room, she had to press a hand on her mouth to prevent herself from screaming, which would definitely not be a good thing. The man who had just looked like a normal human had become a kind of blue centaur with no mouth, two extra eyes and a deadly looking blade on the tail. Still trying to be quiet, she sneaked out again and then ran towards the woods as fast as she could. She slowed down as she reached the first trees and continued walking to the place where she had spent so much time with Rachel while they had still been kids. But now Rachel, who had been her best friend once, rarely even talked to her. Instead she spent the entire time with Jake, Marco, Cassie and that strange boy, who was supposedly Jake´s long lost cousin Philip. He had the habit of spelling out the syllables of every word he said and she had seen the others pulling him away from the food court at the mall, where he tried to eat everything he could, more than once. She sat down on a tree trunk and looked into the sky until she heard a bird screeching and a red-tailed hawk landed on the tree next to her.

Tobias looked down at Melissa. She seemed really upset and sad, as if something had happened which she could not really understand. He had a suspicion of what that could be, but as he was not able to talk to her directly he would need help from the others. He called out in thought-speech: "Jake, Marco, Cassie, Rachel, can any of you hear me? Please answer. Melissa is here and she looks like she immediately needs someone to talk. I think she has found out that her parents are Controllers." The answer came promptly: "Tobias, this is Rachel. Can you watch her for a few minutes, make sure she does not do anything stupid? I am on my way."

Rachel arrived at the meadow five minutes later and sat down on the ground next to the crying Melissa. She put her arm around the other girl until she had calmed down a bit, then she asked: "Melissa, what is wrong?" Melissa looked at her with fear in the eyes and said: "I came home from school today and saw this man in our living room. He turned into an alien in front of my eyes and my parents acted like nothing had happened. I came out here before any of them could see me." Rachel´s blood turned cold immediately and she looked up to Tobias, who immediately called out to the others: "Melissa has seen Visser Three demorph. Rachel will bring her to Cassie´s barn. Can you meet us there? I think we will have to tell her and give her the chance to become one of us."


	2. Chapter 2

After they had walked a while, Melissa suddenly stopped, looked at Rachel and asked: "You do believe me, Rachel? You do not think I have imagined anything?" Rachel thought for a while, then she replied:" Yes, I believe you. I have seen that man more times than I could count. Now I will bring you to the others and we will explain everything." They continued to walk in silence until they reached Cassie´s barn, where Jake, Marco, Cassie and Tobias were already waiting. The only one that was missing was Ax. After ten minutes had passed and there was still no sign of him, Tobias flew over to his scoop. 

When he got there, he called for his friend, but did not receive an answer. He landed on the ground, looking for anything that might tell him what had happened. The Hork-Baijr footsteps on the ground were the only thing he needed to know that Ax had been taken by the Yeerks and probably had become a controller in the meantime. Via thought-speech he told the others of the situation.

When he arrived back at the barn, he landed on a nearby tree and listened while Rachel started to explain: "About four months ago, we came home from the mall one day and decided to take a shortcut through the old construction site. While we where there, we saw an alien ship crashing. The alien inside came out after a short time and introduced himself as Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul. 

Unfortunately he was later killed by his enemy, Visser Three, the one you saw today, or at least we thought so. He showed up again after a week, together with a friend called Arbron and gave us the power to morph, to become any animal we want. Visser Three´s host and Elfangor are the same  
species, they are called Andalites, but Visser Three´s host, Alloran-Semitur-Corrass, has been taken over by the enemy, the Yeerks. He is now what the Andalites call a Controller, like your parents are. 

A few weeks later, we all rescued Elfangor´s younger brother. He was trapped in the Andalite ship, which had fallen into the ocean. We brought him here and we started to fight the Yeerks together. We call him Ax, like we say Al to Elfangor, because their full names are too long. We would introduce him to you, but it looks like that he has been taken during the night. Unfortunately Elfangor is out of town this week, so we have no chance to find him at the moment. We have talked to him on the phone and we decided to offer you the chance to become one of us, if you would like." 

Melissa did not have to think very long before she agreed to the offer. They went to the Gardens together after she had received the new power. It was already night, so they were not in danger of being disturbed. They went from cage to cage and Melissa acquired six animals, before she decided that it was enough for the first time. While they went home, she tried out her first morph, a snow owl. The other five were lynx, polar bear, maned wolf, porcupine and squirrel monkey, which was her favourite animal. Before they separated, they agreed that Tobias should continue trying to find out what had happened to Ax and the others would meet him after school the next day.


	3. Chapter 3

Ax woke up and immediately noticed that he was surrounded by four Hork-Bajir and three Taxxons, all pointing Dracon beams at him.   
Clearly they had orders to shoot if they saw him morphing, but he felt too disorientated to concentrate on anything at the moment.   
The guards stepped closer and signaled for him to walk ahead of them. Ax followed the order, he knew he could not do anything else in his current state, he did not even feel his tail. The walk was not very long, but still the Hork-Bajir had to help him up several times. Finally they got to a room with a small cage just big enough for an Andalite to stand in it. He was roughly pushed in, then the Guards left the room and Ax fell asleep again.

He was jolted awake again when he felt Visser Three´s tailblade on his neck, ready to cut it in half. He motioned to the Guards to come closer.   
Soon the two Andalites were surrounded and the Visser removed the blade, before he had two of them force Ax to turn around to face him.   
Then the questioning started. A few hours later a fuming Visser left Ax lying on the floor and instructed the others to keep him alive no matter the cost. He was determined to break this prisoner and find out who the others with him were. He would not make him a Controller or let him die before he had the information, even though infesting him might be easier. For the next few days this became a routine, until Ax was close to tell everything. 

Then he met Mairana and her mother Jahar, who gave him new hope. It was a shock for him that they were Alloran´s daughter and wife, who had been brought here as hostages about a week ago, to ensure his cooperation. Neither of them knew how the Yeerks had managed to kidnap them from the Andalite homeworld, but it did not matter to them as soon as they were together.

Rachel sat in her chair, trying to listen to the teacher, but her thoughts kept going back to Ax. Tobias had looked for their friend at every known entrance to the Yeerk pool, but had never seen him. Now he was already missing for three days and even he was not a Controller by now, he surely had been brought to a Yeerk ship in orbit and they had no hope to get him back without help on the inside. Every day the mood had become darker, even Marco did not make his usual bad jokes anymore.

Melissa, the newest animorph had started to get along well with the others, but as she did not really know Ax, she did not miss him as much as the others did. Her main focus was on keeping her secret from her controller parents. This morning she had asked Jake how he could stand looking at Tom, knowing he was one as well and keep himself from trying to rip the Yeerk out. Unfortunately he did not really have an answer to this, which made her even sadder and that in turn had made Jake angrier at the parasites as he was before.


	4. Chapter 4

Melissa locked her bedroom door, then she opened the window and started to morph into owl. She flew out and circled above the house for a while, before she started to head out into the woods. The moon was bright and there were almost no clouds, so it was a perfect night for flying. She landed on a tree next to the barn where the Animorphs normally met and soon noticed a wolf coming towards her from the direction of the house. 

It stopped directly beneath her and looked up. Then she heard a voice ask: "Is that you, Melissa? Are you have sleeping problems as well?" Immediately she knew that the wolf had to be Cassie, flew down to her and then they both started to demorph. The two girls went into the barn and talked to each other until midnight before Cassie got tired. After she had gone back home, Melissa turned back to her owl and started thinking about how similar they were. Until that night she had seen Cassie only as Rachel´s best friend, but had never bothered to get to know her better. She stayed until there was only half an hour of the morph limit left, before she returned to her house. Once she was there, she saw light in her bedroom and her father sitting on the bed waiting for her. She landed out of sight and demorphed, before she took the mobile she had left out there for emergencies and called her father on the phone. While he was downstairs, she morphed again, flew into the window, got into her bed and became human again.

A few minutes later she felt her father shaking her. He yelled:"Where have you been, Melissa? I saw you sneaking out at eight and I have waited for you for five hours. I do not think you can imagine how worried I was. You will have house arrest for the rest of the month. I will drive you to school and back." Melissa just nodded to everything he said, but to herself she thought that the Yeerk in her father´s head was a terrible liar. Still, if he picked the lock of her room in the middle of the night, just to look if she was there, he had to suspect something. She tried to remember if she had done anything to make him suspicious, but came up with nothing. The next day, she got into the bathroom during lunch break and morphed just enough to be able to use thought-speech. She directed it to all her friends and told them everything that happened last night. After school Rachel passed her in the corridor and shoved a note into her hand. Melissa put it into her pocket and went to her father´s office, where she sat on a chair until he was ready to go home. Once she was in her room she pulled the note out. It said: "We will come to you this evening. One of us will morph into you while we are gone, so your father will not notice anything. "


	5. Chapter 5

Ax slowly opened his eyes and looked around. His whole body was hurting from the interrogation of Visser Three that had ended just seconds before he passed out. The area around him was so dark that he could not see anything, but there was someone moving not very far away. He put out one hand and touched glass only a few metres next to him. At that moment he realized that the Yeerks had put him into a cage, which they had covered somehow, so he could not see what happened outside. 

He had no hope to get out of this situation any time soon, his friends probably did not even know where he was, even if they had realized that he was gone yet. Just before he lost himself to the grey cloud that took over his mind more and more often now, he thought he heard someone whisper: "Keep holding on, Ax, my friend. We are getting you out of this soon." But that could only have been his imagination, that was playing tricks on him.

The next thing he knew was being pulled along a corridor by two Hork-Bajir, while two others followed together with four Taxxons and he did not doubt that they were taking him to Visser Three for another interrogation. But this time it was different, as Mairana and Jahar were in the room as well. Both of them were guarded closely. Then the Visser walked in and at this moment all the guards suddenly pointed their weapons at him. They quickly overwhelmed him and knocked him out, before one of them threw him over his shoulder and walked out. The others gestured to the three Andalites left in the room to follow them. 

They helplessly looked at each other before they decided to do as they had been asked. They would probably not have a second chance to get out undetected. They walked until they reached the entrance to a smaller Yeerk ship. As soon as they had boarded, almost all guards remained standing outside, only one of them entered the ship and started the engines. After they were at a safe distance, he activated the autopilot and turned around, taking on the form of someone Ax knew well. For a while he could only stare, trying to make sense of what just happened. 

The flight back to Earth took several hours, giving Ax enough time to tell the other Andalites everything that had happened after the Animorphs had rescued him from the bottom of the ocean. When he was finished with his story, both Mairana and Jahar looked at him speechless. They landed somewhere in the mountains a few minutes later. His rescuers had chosen a good place for them to keep Alloran in check, while they waited for the Visser to starve. Jahar decided to keep first watch, leaving Ax and Mairana alone. For the most part they just stood next to each other, looking at the stars and secretly hoping that they could return to the homeworld together one day.


	6. Chapter 6

It only took one day for the Yeerk to starve, as his last feeding had been two days ago. While the others were watching over Alloran, Ax spent the time catching up with their rescuer, an old friend of him. Her name was Lareen and she was a member of the Merilian race. They looked essentially like the creatures the humans called chameleons and they had always been allies of the Andalites. They had the power to look like everything they wanted, from stones to living beings. Ax still remembered the day they had first met:

It had been a beautiful day in the summer and he had tried to get away from his parents, when he noticed Lareen. She had not looked where she was going and was about to fall of a cliff. He barely had time to catch her and pull her to safety. Until that day they had been very good friends and played jokes every time they met, until they had driven his parents and Elfangor mad. Then one day she had just disappeared without a word for over ten years, until she came to get him and the others out of the Blade ship.

He looked over to the spot, where the others were waiting for him. After Alloran had been freed, he suggested to return to the Yeerks and pretend to be Visser Three, who had captured part of the Andalite bandits. It was a dangerous plan, but they had all agreed to it. It would be a big help for the humans, if they had the former host of Visser Three on their side. A few hours ago, Alloran had contacted his second in command and ordered him to pick them up. The unfortunate controller had looked like he was about to pass out from fear, after the show had been over. Ax could not help but feel amazed about the way Alloran played the Visser, it was almost better than the original had been.

The ground shook as the transport ship landed in front of them. Alloran had pulled out a Dracon beam after he got confirmation that the Yeerks were coming and pointed it at the others while they waited. Ax, Mairana and Jahar got aboard first, Alloran followed them a few seconds later. After they were finally all inside the transport lifted off again and they were on the way back to the Blade ship, where Lareen would wait for them, to help them as best as she could, like she had promised. The only thing that troubled Ax was that he had still found no way to contact Prince Jake and the others to inform them about what had happened and what he was planning to do. He had a feeling that they were going to need them very soon.


End file.
